A hurricane planning tool used by meteorologists and emergency managers to make critical decisions like evacuation orders is about to be inaccessible indefinitely due to the expiration of the federal contract governing it.
The web-based tool, known as HURREVAC, is owned and paid for by FEMA but administered by the Army Corps. Hiring engineers through interministerial agreements. That contract was not renewed and the contract remains in place.
Officials within FEMA, as well as outside meteorologists and the International Association of Emergency Managers, have warned that access to the database would almost certainly be cut off in this situation, and will be cut off soon.
The HURREVAC program allows local authorities to not only simulate past hurricanes, but also create detailed composites of future storms. It will be used for training between National Weather Service meteorologists and emergency management officials in case an actual hurricane strikes.
This tool is used by tens of thousands of communities and incorporates information about storm surge flooding through the National Weather Service’s surge modeling tool called SLOSH, but access to this tool can also be affected by the same interagency agreements and related contract expirations.
Within FEMA, officials have been trying to get a new cooperation agreement approved for months, complicated by the agency’s cumbersome contract approval process under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Brian LaMarr, former chief meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Tampa office and now a private consulting meteorologist, said this is the time of year when emergency training typically begins, and the start of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season is about three months away.
Lamar warned that delays in implementing emergency management training could leave the Gulf Coast unprepared for the upcoming storm season. LaMarr said HURREVAC is “used to actually simulate what a particular storm might cause,” and not just to simulate evacuations. For example, NWS and emergency management personnel can simulate storms of a certain strength hitting a community from different directions to show how storm surge heights and required evacuations vary.
The purpose of these simulations is to enable local leaders to make safety decisions based on the latest forecast information and historical knowledge of evacuation times, routes, and other factors.
The IAEM, which represents more than 6,000 emergency managers, warned in a March 18 statement that suspending the HURREVAC support tool “will deprive emergency managers of critical storm surge visualization, training modules, and traffic modeling as hurricane season approaches.” The group noted that the HURREVAC contract is only valid until Friday.
HURREVAC is also used during hurricane season, where authorities can use the tool to see and investigate live data to support life-or-death decisions in real time, such as telling parts of a community to evacuate before waters rise, Lamar said.
He said the hurricane’s path, a “cone of uncertainty,” can be overlaid on regional maps, making it easy for planners to see how changes in the storm could affect local communities.
He said “if the contract is not renewed” and the tool is not accessible, it “will have a significant impact” by reducing the time available for storm training, and if it is not available during hurricane season, communities will lose a critical means of understanding incoming storm information.
FEMA did not respond to requests for comment.
CNN’s Gabe Cohen contributed to this report
